Recently, laminated boards have been widely used to build sailing boats, racing cars, airplanes and other vehicles. Particularly, the laminated boards of honeycomb-sandwich construction having a honeycomb material as its core and composite materials as its skin layers are advantageously used because of its light weight and strength.
The molding laminated plate described above is conventionally molded as follows. That is, a honeycomb core is laid on between two composite material sheets to form a honeycomb-sandwich construction, and then the formed honeycomb-sandwich construction is put in an autoclave to be cured by heating under pressure.
This autoclave molding, however, requires a large autoclave whose size is large enough to permit relatively large body parts to be put in the autoclave when building extremely large molding laminated plates such as sailing boats or airplanes. In such a large autoclave it is difficult to make full use of thermal energy, and accordingly the running cost will disadvantageously increase. Still disadvantageously, it is difficult to heat the laminate evenly, and therefore there is a fear of imperfect adhesion between the honeycomb core and the skin layers.
Therefore, an object of the present invention is to solve the foregoing defects as in the prior art described above and provide a method and apparatus of molding laminated plates which method and apparatus of molding laminated plates no matter what a large size they may have, without requiring any autoclave of a large size.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a method and apparatus of molding laminated plates which permit most effective use of heat in almost full response to requirements upon molding the molding laminated plates.